I Love Paddling

Doc Fletcher’s book Weekend Canoeing in Michigan: The Rivers, the Towns, the Taverns isn’t your average canoe guide. Allow us to enumerate a few reasons why: #1 — For each river described, it lists the area radio station carrying Detroit Tigers’ games. #2 — It reviews at least one local watering hole along each river. #3 — It […]

Rainy weather yesterday postponed the final day of whitewater canoeing action at the Beijing Olympic Games.  Finals of the men’s doubles canoe competition — C-2 in the Olympic parlance — as well as semifinals and finals of the women’s singles kayak competition, were moved to Friday. The USA’s Benn Fraker was the top North American […]

Two adults found guilty in the August 7, 2007 shooting rampage in northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness were sentenced yesterday to three years in state prison. Both men are also banned from entering the popular wilderness area for five years. Barney James Lakner and Jay Andrew Olson, both of Ely, Minnesota, were part […]

The typical weekend canoe-camper probably doesn’t think of her activity in Olympic terms. But, canoeing is indeed a sport on the Olympic program, even if the action doesn’t exactly resemble the experience of the rank-and-file paddling set. Olympic canoeing includes flatwater and whitewater disciplines. The flatwater events are contested over 500 and 1,000 meter distances […]

A fire burns, a forest grows, a forest changes. In Canoeing.com’s latest Nature & Environment section feature story, contributor Alissa Johnson examines the ecological impact of last year’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness fires. Two blazes left 165 square miles of contiguous forest burned. The 2007 fires engulfed trees toppled in the 1999 BWCAW “blowdown” […]

The Minnesota news web site MinnPost recently noted THIS article in Wilderness Medicine that compared various water purification techniques commonly used by canoe campers and other wilderness travelers. The winner, according to MinnPost’s Mark Neuzil … boiling your drinking water.While each technique had its drawbacks — boiling’s were that it’s time consuming and inconvenient — […]

Carolyn Szczepanski, a reporter for Kansas City’s The Pitch, a weekly free newspaper, recently followed the action of the Missouri River 340 Canoe and Kayak Race. The 340-mile-long race starts in Kansas City, on the western edge of Missouri, and races to St. Charles, on the State’s eastern side, near the Missouri Rivers’ confluence with […]

We enjoyed a recent column by Minnesota’s Duluth News-Tribune outdoor writer Sam Cook so much, we wanted to share it with you. Cook, on a canoe trip in Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, climbs out of his tent on a moonlit night and steps into a different way of looking at the world. “It was possible, standing there, to imagine the […]